I’ve been asked a lot about how effective my 30 Sugar Free Days Program and my new Alien Diet Program is for weight loss and while I could give you a lot of diet success stories, why don’t I let the people who have been through the program let you know:

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I just began my third week on Sunday, and my wedding ring is loose! All my clothes are baggy and I don’t think I will ever eat sugar again! I love how you said you can feel like an “alien on planet carbohydrate” … that’s exactly how I feel! I have found some wonderful farms in my area and I’m shopping at the market less and less. Thank you so much, this is exactly what I needed!

Hilary Barry

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My great news is the my cholesterol went from 268 to 184 and my triglycerides from 271 to 75. I am simply amazed!  My cholesterol and triglycerides have never been that low as far back as my records show which is 1998.  This after being sugar free for just 4 months. It proves to me how dangerous sugar is to our health.  This is great motivation for me!

Thank you again.  I am floating above the clouds after being so down for so long with these high numbers.

Marion Pippin

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I’ve been sugar free for a little over 2 weeks now, and Dr. Scott was right, my cravings severely declined within the first week I would say. Now I don’t even think about sweets! That’s not to say that at this point I wouldn’t WANT something sweet , but I have the willpower to turn it down because my cravings are no…t out of control. I’ve never gone this long without sugar or bread, I can’t believe I’ve made it this far

Nerine E

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Thanks a million for your program and sage advice. I did not follow the plan strictly for these 30 days (it is my second time around), but kept the principles in mind to adjust my entire lifestyle for the rest of my life. I am a former fat girl, went from 170 lb in my teens to now 115 lbs at 47 years old. I look and feel better tha n I ever have in my life. I can do 30+ pushups, vigorous cardio, working with a preschool population with ceaseless energy. Everyday, I work out and I eat a lower carb, low sugar diet super rich in veggies, fruit, nuts and meats…

I think what you offer us is so great…Your language and formatting is direct, concise and easy to absorb.  You do not come across like a lobbyist, or in-it-for-profit industrialist, or highly technical scientist…

Your encouragement and inspiration works to motivate me.  You are giving the gift of a better-lived life:   with a healthier body, clearer thinking, more energy to be the best YOU…I am so grateful.

Diane Rogers

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I’ve completed 7 days and lost 1.5 pounds. I don’t think I’ve ever EVER gone 7 hours without sugar so this is a HUGE accomplishment. I really look forward to the emails. I keep them all and reread when I need a boost.

Very nice program!

Jess Marke

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I’ve been low-carbing for 5 years now and feel terrific. Still, I have a sweet treat from time to time and was having a horrid problem eliminating artificial sweeteners from my diet. Your challenge inspired me – 30 days! I could do that.

Thanks for sponsoring this!

Bev C

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I’m sorry but I didn’t think to take pictures but I did take body measurements and I lost about 2” off my hips. I hope that helped, I plan to keep doing it for life. Thanks a lot!

Cathy

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I’ve been sugar free and actually, mostly meat free as well, for almost 3 weeks now. The weight is coming off finally and I feel free. I feel that I’m healing from all the destructive foods I’ve eaten in the past year. Not eating the meat has provided my liver to clean up, so I’m grateful to be “cleaning house”. I can tell by my increased energy and healthier looking skin, that it’s really helping.

My cravings have virtually disappeared, I think because I’ve eliminated the foods that trigger the cravings. It’s been, actually, the easiest weight I’ve lost in a long time.

So, thank you again. Just had to write and let you know how much I appreciate this.

Elaine A

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I have become a much healthier person in the last month (my doctor said I could lower my insulin from 30 units to 25) and I thank God for finding you and your program on the internet! Thank you for staying in touch with me through the 30 day challenge and being the encouragement that you are!

God Bless You, Joe

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After just two weeks going sugar free, the biggest benefits I get are:

• Less muscle pain.

• Better sleeping at night.

• More energy.

• Clearer thinking. That is the number one reason I’ve gone without sugar. Sugar fogs my brain. After just two weeks going sugar free, I can think clearly, process difficult decisions effortlessly and remember much better.

• I simply function more efficiently.

Again, thank you for the 30 days plan. I think it’s great!

Yours truly,

Julia M

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I just finished the 30 day Sugar Free Days. I really enjoyed having someone who knew what I was going through. I thought I had been sugar free for three months before I started your program, but I didn’t realize how many products I was eating contain sugar by a different name. I would go to my computer each morning before breakfast to read your encouragements. I learned a lot from your e-mails and printed some out for reference.

I am pre diabetic and my blood sugar was in the 100-115 range when I started four months ago. It has only been in the low 90?s for the last week, for which I am grateful to you. I didn’t think I could get it down without medication. I am having my cholesterol checked on Monday. I am hoping for the same result.

Thank you very much,

Marion

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There are more diet success stories on Facebook, check them out here: Facebook Group 30 Sugar Free Days

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Want to learn how to break a sweet tooth addiction? That is easy. Well it is easy to say (but actually very hard to do). If you have ever tried to stop eating sugar then you know just how hard it is and new research is showing us exactly why it is so hard to kick the white death out of our diets. While you might have wrestled with your sweet tooth in the past, let me show you how you can knock it down and finally triumph over this pesky troublemaker.

Why is it so Hard to Break a Sweet Tooth Addiction?

Do you want to know why it is hard to break your sweet tooth action? The answer is simple: Because it is a real addiction. Research has shown that sugar addiction is every bit as powerful and hard to kick as addiction to alcohol, smoking, and even hard drugs.

So while you might be kicking yourself for not being strong enough to fight your sweet tooth, you should cut yourself some slack because sugar addiction ranks high on the hard-things-to-kick list.

How You Can Break Your Sweet Tooth Addiction

If you want to break your sweet tooth addiction, the first thing you have to do is stop thinking it is going to be easy. No one tells an alcoholic (or a drug addict) that they can get rid of their addiction easily. Fighting against your sweet tooth will take time and effort and you will be constantly tested in ways that other addictions are not. For example: how many cigarette ads do you see on the television? And how many of your friends think you are crazy to stop eating sugar? We are bombarded with sugar advertisements daily and most people who stop eating sugar feel alone in a world of sugar junkies. So, take your addiction seriously and understand it is going to be hard.

The second way to succeed in kicking your sugar addiction is find some support. There are many ways to find the support that you need. The best support comes from friends or family members who want to go on a sugar-free holiday with you, but there are also groups on Facebook or other web-based sites that can help you as well.

I have a 30 Day Program called the 30 Sugar Free Days that helps people get off of sugar. Check it out here: 30 Sugar Free Days. You can break your sweet tooth addiction, but it will take time. Breaking your sugar addiction is well worth the effort as you will likely lose weight and feel much better.

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Does eating sugar give you a headache? The sugar headache, otherwise known as the Holliday Headache (because we eat so much sugar on Easter, Halloween, Christmas and other holidays) has a lot in common with a hangover headache but it strikes any time year when we overdo sugar.

While most have experienced a sugar headache at some time in their lives it is not well known in medical circles. It might even surprise you to learn that the exact causes of all headaches are a bit of a mystery. Migraines and cluster headaches are thought to be vascular (having to do with blood flow) but how blood changes create a headache is unknown; the same is true of the sugar headache.

I view the sugar headache as a toxicity or dehydration event and while it might be an annoyance it could also be the sign of something more dangerous. Let’s look at dehydration ad toxicity and see how they might cause a headache.

Sugar Dehydration

Dehydration is a common way to get a headache and sugar can lead to dehydration. Eating too much sugar dehydrates your body in two ways.

• Dilution: When you eat too much sugar, your body has to dilute that sugar to keep it from harming your body. This means that water is being pulled from all parts of your body to balance the large amount of sugar in your blood stream. While this water-pulling effect happens all over the body, it is your head that suffers the most.

• Urination: One of the ways that your body has of getting rid of excess sugar is to dump it in your urine. This is especially true of diabetics, who have to go to the bathroom a lot.

Toxicity

The other way to think about sugar is to consider it a toxic event. While your body runs on glucose (a simple sugar) it was never meant to have a ton of simple sugars running around in the blood. If you look to nature, you would find that there are almost no foods that contain the high amount of sugar you would find in a soda or piece of cake. If natural foods do contain a high amount of sugar it is often bound up and hard to get to (like in a sugar cane). The only way to get a large amount of sugar into your body is to have that sugar processed before you put it in your mouth. Processed sugar or processed grains both act like sugar in your body and this is toxic to the very blood cells that carry the sugar throughout the body. (I explain this at length in my book Sugarettes).

Something Worse?

Sugar headaches can also be a warning. If you get sugar headaches often, you might just be diabetic or pre-diabetic. The best way to find out if you are diabetic is to go and see your doctor and have them run some blood tests, but here are the typical symptoms of diabetes:

• Excessive urination: As I mentioned above, sugar acts like a diuretic and will spill sugar and water into the urine. Having to urinate a lot is often one of the first signs of diabetes.
• Excessive thirst: Since diabetics are losing a lot of water (see above), they are often thirsty all the time.
• Excessive hunger: Everyone has periods of time when they are hungry, but diabetics are hungry all the time (with strong cravings for carbohydrates, sweets and sugar). This is one of the strange things about diabetics: They have a lot of sugar in their bodies, but it is not being used by the cells so they are hungry all the time.

Sugar Headache

The reasons why sugar gives you a headache are many and not readily understood. But you don’t have to wait for a reason to stop the pain in your head.

You can stop your sugar headaches and give sugar the boot by trying my 30 Sugar Free Days Program. During the program, you will learn about foods that act like sugar and what you can do about your cravings. Make sure you understand that sugar is doing more harm to your body than just giving you a sugar headache, take this opportunity to learn from your headache that you shouldn’t be putting large amounts of sugar in your mouth and you need to make a change.

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If you ask most medical doctors or even established associations such as the American Diabetes Association (see Diabetes Myths) you will find that they think that eating sugar has nothing to do with diabetes. To most people it seems mind bogglingly simple to connect a sugar control problem (diabetes) with eating too much sugar but the medical community just can’t seem to make that leap.

For the rest of us that live on planet reality it is obvious that eating sugar can cause diabetes. How do we know that? Because humans that don’t have access to purified white sugar or foods that act like sugar simply don’t have diabetes. If you look around the globe, you see that people who are unlucky enough to be able to go to the store and pick up a bag of sugar (or get a soda, or buy a bag of chips) are the same people who have diabetes.

A sugar free diet for your diabetes will not only help you, but can dramatically reduce or eliminate your need for medications.

White Sugar

The image you have to get into your head about white sugar is that it is the 100-proof vodka of foods. When you pick up a bag of sugar and the label says that it is almost 99 percent sucrose (and nothing else), that means that your sugar has been so refined that there is nothing else in that bag but pure sucrose. No food this pure exists on the earth until human hands purify it. White sugar is like a drug – only more pure than any you would find on the streets.

But here is the problem.

You can remove all the sugar you want from your diet but if you don’t also remove the foods that act just like sugar in your body then you are not doing yourself any good. What are the foods that act like sugar? They are foods such as bread, crackers, chips and certain fruits and vegetables and they all act just like eating sugar. Want to learn more? Check out my article on the foods that act like sugar.

How to Go Sugar Free

If you are going to do a sugar free diet for diabetics then you are going to need some help.

First let me caution you that changing the way that you eat (especially if you remove sugars and foods that act like sugar) can dramatically change your blood sugar. This is no problem if you are not on medications for your diabetes, but if you are taking medications for blood sugar control then you can put yourself in a dangerous position by simply eating better. Let me suggest that you work with your doctor or health care provider if you are taking diabetic medications and you are going to change your diet.

I find that the easiest way to change your diet is to follow a plan and I have a 30 Sugar Free Days Program that you are welcome to join (there is free version) and try going 30 days without sugar and foods that act like sugar.

Take the plunge and try the 30 sugar free days challenge:

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You know that sugar is bad for you and your kids, so you take another look at the label. But even that is a nightmare: You know that glucose is a sugar but what about maltodextrin, or dextrose?

All this is enough to make you go crazy! Even if you are successful at steaming the tide of sugar into your house, your kids are often out of your sight and exposed to sugar in their daycare, their schools, or, if they are older… everywhere they can travel.

Sugar Consumption Junction

We consume a lot of sugar. Most adults and children are eating 1/4 to 1/2 of a pound of sugar every day.

Kids are no better:

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics, found that

• 10 to 15 percent of our children’s total calories are coming from fruit juice or soda (and juice, from a sugar point of view, is no better than soda).
• Children and teens aged six to eighteen, averaged 30 ounces of juice or soda every day (or 20 teaspoons of sugar).
• Younger children were drinking an average of 15.5 ounces of sugary drinks (or 10 teaspoons of sugar a day).

What is amazing about this study is that it only focused on sugars in drinks and not the cereal, cookies, jam, candies, crackers, ice cream and other foods our children are eating. Clearly, our children are eating a lot of sugar.

The Problem with Sugar

If you have ever wondered if sugar is harmful or not, let me put your mind at unrest: sugar is harmful. While there is not a single established medical association that has yet to speak up, there is mounting evidence that sugar is harming our health and the health of our children.

Sugar has two distinct characteristics that make it harmful.

First, sugar is addictive. Scientists have discovered is that sugar is every bit as addictive as cigarettes, alcohol, and even hard drugs. Rats that have become addicted to sugar act the same and have the same brain chemistry as rats addicted to those other “hard” drugs. So when you try to take sugar away from your children and they go crazy you know that you are experiencing addictive behavior. This is why we as adults also have a hard time staying away from the white stuff. Sugar has a powerful grip on us and seeing sugar as addiction explains a lot of the behavior we see around sugar, including binging, cravings and even yo-yo dieting. If you feel constantly pulled by sugar’s sweet song, you are not alone.

Second, sugar damages the body and it does so through three mechanisms.

• Weight: The standard medical opinion of sugar is that it contains calories, so it may add to our growing obesity epidemic, but only because of the calories it contains. This is true, but sugar does so much more to add to our weight. When our blood sugar is raised to the high levels that occur when we eat sugar (and especially when we drink sugar), our bodies store that extra sugar-energy as fat. This is a unique aspect of sugar that doesn’t occur, say, when you eat a steak.
• Insulin Insensitivity: Consistently high blood sugar leads to insulin insensitivity. When the cells of our body become insensitive to insulin it creates a downward spiral to poor sugar control, including metabolic syndrome and eventually diabetes.
• Toxic: Sugar is toxic in much the same way that cigarette smoke is toxic to the lungs of a smoker; only sugar harms our blood vessels. As sugar enters our blood stream, it damages the very blood vessels that carry sugar throughout the body. We see this damage dramatically in people with very high blood sugar (diabetes) whose eyes, kidneys, hearts, and nerves are all damaged by sugar. The same sugar damage occurs in people who are not diabetic, only at a slower rate.

Sugar is at least partly responsible for the ever growing epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease and it even affects the brains and moods of our children.

How to Survive Sugar Land

For most of us, completely eliminating sugar from our children’s diet is an impossible task. Not only do we have to face our children’s and our own addiction, but our children are out of our sight for much of the day – especially as they grow older.

In the study mentioned above in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that most of the sugar consumption (55-70 percent) occurred in the home, so parents do have a lot of control. Here are some ideas to help you control the amount of sugar your children are consuming:

• Get rid of soda: Removing all soda from the house can dramatically cut down on the amount of sugar that children are eating. Fruit juice should also go, but many parents feel they need some sweet drink in the house and while fruit juice still alters blood sugar, it does contain some nutrients – use with moderation.
• Look for hidden sugars: While you won’t know if everything on a label is sugar, look for the OSE at the end of the ingredient. Examples of sugars include glucose, maltose, fructose, dextrose; this won’t help you find all the sugars, but it will take care of most of them.
• Eat crunchy: Encourage your children to eat something fresh and crunchy with every meal. When we try this in our home, our kids always say potato chips are crunchy and we have to say, no: fresh and crunchy. Good crunchy foods are carrots, celery, apples, pears, peaches… and really most fruit.
• Eat Fruit: For the most part, fruits, eaten in whole-form, are much better and don’t cause a rise in blood sugar the way that juices made from the same fruits do. Try mixed berries with a little whipped cream as an afternoon snack (whipped cream makes anything fun).
• Stay away from artificial sugars: While the subject of artificial sweeteners is an article (or a book) in itself, let me say that these chemical sweeteners are harmful enough to recommend eating sugar over them. Artificial sweeteners are chemicals that shouldn’t be in our bodies and we are just beginning to see the damage that they cause.
• Sugar substitutes: The best natural sugars are Stevia and xylitol. Stevia is an herb that is super-sweet but has no calories, and it actually helps with blood sugar control. It takes some effort to learn how to cook with it, but it usually satisfies that sweet tooth. Xylitol is a sugar that has some benefits including not increasing blood sugar dramatically and it has also been shown to be an anti-cavity sugar.

What to do if you can’t stay away from sugars:

• Know what keeps blood sugar low: If you cannot get sugar out of your life, you need to understand how to keep you and your children’s blood sugar low. The nutrients that keep blood sugar low are: protein, fats and fiber. So the best way to eat a sugar is to eat it in a meal where protein, fats and fiber are present. This means giving children their desert right after dinner, or having them include other foods (that contain a protein, fat or fiber) with their snack. So don’t pass out the cookies without, say, a hot dog. Don’t give a juice box without, say, peanut butter. Peanut butter (especially the non-added sugar kind) makes everything taste good: put it on apples, carrots, celery… whatever they will eat.

Sugar Challenge

You are in for a challenge when you try to keep sugar away from kids; doing the right thing is hard. Every step you make to remove sugar is a step in the right direction. Sugar is a powerful foe, but you can lessen the damage with a few simple changes in what you are offering your children. If you are really brave, you can check out the 30 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge.

Good luck and good eating!

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While medical doctors scoff at the idea that Candida can cause illness, many people swear by anti-Candida diets and claim that they feel much better when they eliminate sugar and other foods that might contribute to the growing of these yeasts.

There is a big gulf between what most natural medicine practitioners and medical doctors think about Candida. To confuse you even further, I’m going to suggest to you a completely different way of looking at Candida that dispels some of the myths around this one-celled creature, but also helps you to understand why the anti-Candida diets do work and how important that might be to your health.

Not Just Candida

The problem with Candida is that it doesn’t travel alone To understand this, you have to understand a concept called dysbiosis.

Perhaps it is just human nature to simplify things, but the story of Candida is much more complex than one simple yeast causing your pain and discomfort. Dysbiosis is described as an imbalance of the bacterial ecosystem in your gut. The ecosystem in your gut  (also called gut flora) is a big deal and when you are eating sugar and foods that act like sugar, you are changing the ecosystem in your gut (and not in a good way).

There are both good and bad bacteria throughout your digestive system. The health of your digestive system relies heavily on having a balance between the good and bad bacteria that inhabit your gut. Unfortunately, many of the things we do every day destroy that balance: Poor food choices, stress, and exposure to chemicals in our environment, all tilt the balance in the favor of bad bacteria. When bad bacteria thrive, we don’t.

Bad bacteria are bad because when they grow, they produce all sorts of toxins that are harmful to our bodies. Candida itself produces toxins that some people seem to be extremely sensitive to. Imbalances in our digestive flora are tied to all sorts of diseases, from heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune diseases and more.

The first thing to remember is this: Candida is not alone, there are other critters such as bacteria that can harm you just as much as Candida does. It is not just Candida, but a general shift from health gut bugs to unhealthy gut bugs.

Can Candida Make me Crave Sugar?

This is a bit tougher to answer than you might think: The answer to this question is yes and no.

Most people think that Candida causes them to crave sugar as if the small one-celled organism can collectively take over your mind and cause you to crave more sugar. As far as we know, Candida doesn’t have that kind of mind control powers.

But what does happen when you eat a large amount of sugar and foods that act like sugar is that you grow gut flora that also like sugar.

Here is what happens: Imagine you have a garden full of food that rabbits love. When you have a garden like that, you are more likely to have rabbits eating the food in your garden, the same is true of your gut: If you are constantly eating foods high in sugar, then you grow a bacterial colonies that also thrive on sugar.

Now, if you have a gut full of sugar-loving organisms, what happens when you stop eating so much sugar? The bacteria, yeast, and other critters in your gut munch most of the sugars that you are eating (even if you are eating very few). The end result? You (your body) is not getting many of these sugars (because the bugs get to them first). This is one of the reasons why you crave sugars so much when you go on a low-sugar diet: the bugs are eating any sugars that pass their way (after all, they are hungry too).

Stopping Sugar

An anti-Candida diet helps you to feel better because it restores the balance of good bacteria and bad bacteria in your gut. It also is another good reason to kick sugar.

Understanding dysbiosis also helps you to understand why your cravings for sugar to increase when you kick sugar foods: There are so many bacteria and other critters clambering for food that you don’t get as much.

The best way to deal with dysbiosis is to take herbs that make it hard for them to thrive. My favorites are the berberine-containing herbs (such as Oregon Grape, Barberry and Goldenseal). Look for supplements that contain these when you are looking for an anti-Candida diet.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you understand what is really going on when you go on an anti-Candida diet, the results are the same: You feel better. More importantly, you are increasing your health.

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All this is good advice, but there is really only one thing you have to do to improve the chances that you will live longer: Look further down the road.

Looking Further

You spend your days making decisions. You decide to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes you are gong to wear during the day… Many of these decisions are automatic such as brushing your teeth, wearing a seatbelt, scratching your head. And each of those decisions , no matter how minor,  has an impact on your life. Some have a small impact on your life. Other decisions have more impact such as: should you move? should you marry? should you take that job?

The most important decisions you make, though, are the ones that appear to have little impact on your life when taken as a one-time event, but when repeated over a whole lifetime, have a huge impact.

Take a look:

• One cigarette means nothing to your health, but a pack of cigarettes a day for years equal cancer.
• One soda is a tasty treat, three sodas a day means a bigger chance for being overweight and having diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease…
• Driving in a car is the easy way to get to the store, walking instead of driving every day means you live longer.
• You may be too busy to call a friend back, but having good friends means you are more likely to live a longer and fuller life.
• You can’t find the time to exercise today, but exercises over a lifetime gives you energy, better sleep and can forestall diseases such as dementia, heart disease, diabetes and more.

There are more of these you can probably think of, consider adding yours to the comment section below!

Our Brains

Here is the problem: our brains are not set up to look further down the road. Are brains are set up to notice sudden and dramatic threats and adjust to them. If people took a puff from a cigarette and fell down dead, then we would avoid them. But since they kill us slowly, we seem to hardly notice the destruction because it is so slow. The same is true of sugar and other poor foods that we eat. The same is true about deciding to exercise, or take time with friends or the hundred of other healthy things we could be doing.

Humans are unique, though, in the fact that they can see further down the road, they can look at their futures.

Here is what you should commit to in order to increase your odds of staying on the earth longer:

• Eat better: I suggest Eating Below the Glycemic Index you can also try my 30 Sugar Free Days as a way to kick start a healthy eating plan.
• Exercise: Move your body around every day, sweat a little.
• Make Connections: Connect to friends, family and other social groups.
• Laugh: If you are not enjoying life, what is the point?

Take the time to develop habits that empower you and lean you towards better health, the payback is well worth the effort.

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What is a Calorie?

The first thing you need to know is what a calorie is supposed to represent.

When asked, most people will say that calories are the amount of energy that is stored in the food that they eat, and, basically, that is correct. But that it is not the whole story. If you take the common nutritional wisdom about calories as truth, then you would say that every food has energy in it and that certain foods contain more energy than others. For example, by common caloric measurements, both proteins and carbohydrates have about the same amount of energy stored in them (about 4 calories per gram) and fat has over twice the energy (9 calories per gram). This is where the wisdom behind keeping fats out of your diet comes from: there are more calories in fat than in protein and carbohydrates.

Okay, that is all well and good, but let’s stop for a minute and find out how this “energy” is determined.

A calorimeter is a scientific tool that is used to measure calories. To use it, scientists place a food in the calorimeter and then burn that food to ash and measure the amount of energy it took to change that food from its original state to ash. Scientists will tell you that a calorimeter is a good substitution for what happens in the body (but don’t you believe it).

Caloric Consequences

If believed that a calorie was a calorie no matter what, you might make this kind of calculation:

Let’s say that you were eyeing that piece of cake and you found out that the cake contained 300 calories. In your mind you think, “hmm… 300 calories, I think I can burn that off by a little bit of exercise.” So you sit down at your desk and you calculate the amount of exercise that you need to do to burn off that amount of calories. It turns out that if you were running around 9 minute miles (not too fast), you would burn around 775 calories in an hour. [click here to see how many calories you burn per hour] So, you figure that you only have to run for around 20 or 30 minutes to burn off that piece of cake.

If you have ever tried this, you know how crazy this can be. Most people I know who have tried this approach to weight loss stop because they are too frustrated. I’ve had people report to me that they have exercised for one to two hours a day and still can’t lose weight. Shouldn’t that much exercise burn off the calories that they are consuming?

The answer is no, but let’s see why it isn’t so.

It Not the Calories

Using calories as a way to measure what you should be eating can only take you so far. The reason this is true is that you simply are not a calorimeter, you are a living being and not some laboratory tool. Something happens when you consume carbohydrates that is different from what happens when you eat proteins or fats… regardless of calories.

Let me show you why:

Imagine that you have a certain amount of energy your body needs and then you eat something sugary. In the first scenario, you are using exactly what your body needs; you are eating the exact same energy that you are using. If we were to graph that relationship, it would look something like this:

In this first scenario, your body is acting exactly like a calorimeter, you are burning all the energy that is coming your way.

The situation is exactly the same if you are eating sugar energy from carbohydrates and the energy you consume is under your energy needs, like this:

But what happens when you are eating more energy than your body needs at the moment?  This is the situation were your body no longer acts like a calorimeter and calories don’t matter any more:

When you consume energy over your basic energy needs, your body now has a problem: what to do with that extra energy? Well, you probably know the answer to that question. Your body stores those extra calories as fat. This is what makes carbohydrates unique. This is what makes the thoughts about calories obsolete. This is what makes carbohydrates much worse than fats and proteins and this is what no one is telling you: calories don’t matter as much as blood sugar especially when you are talking about weight loss.

To lose weight, yes you need to burn more calories than you are consuming, but you also have to keep your blood sugar from spiking too high and causing your body to store that extra energy as sugar.

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Let me first tell you that your body has its own built-in water calculator and it just doesn’t have to be that complicated and that there is a wholly different way you can look at water intake that just might surprise you.

Your Body’s Calculator

Here is the problem with the five to ten 9-ounce glasses theory: While that sounds like good advice, it makes a blanket statement for everyone without ever considering who you are, where you live and what you are doing. You could be a person who lives in the North Pole or you could be living on the equator. You could be very skinny or you could be large. You could be a couch potato or you could be an ultra-athlete. How can any blanket recommendation of ten glasses of water really apply to all of you?

To personalize water intake, you need to be able to measure how much water your body needs. Fortunately, you have a built-in measuring system that can tell you exactly what your water needs are: the color of your urine.

It works like this: the color of your urine (barring taking certain vitamins that change the color) should be light colored or clear. If your urine is yellow or bright yellow, then you are not getting enough water. So, whether you are a runner, a slacker, a north or south dweller, enjoying the sun or the snow, you can determine your own personal water needs by simply looking down when you visit the bathroom. Some days you will need a lot of water and some days you won’t, it depends on many factors.

But here is something else you want to think about:

You Don’t Need Extra Water

Maybe you don’t need to drink any water, or at least you might not have to drink that much.

If you are following a diet such as what I recommend (80 percent vegetables or fruits and 20 percent proteins) then you will find that you are not that thirsty and that you pass the pee-test for having enough water. The reason why you don’t need to drink as much water is two-fold. The first is that there is a lot of water in fruits and vegetables and that they provide your body with a lot of its water needs.

The second is that eating grains requires a lot of water; if you are not eating grains and sugar, you automatically drop your water needs. This is because grains and sugars don’t contain much water and need water to be able to move them through your system. I also think that many people are allergic to grains and this makes your body hold on to more water than it normally would.

I, personally, only drink one or two glasses of water a day unless I’m out running or biking. This is a dramatic change from when I used to eat a lot of grains and I would drink many glasses of water each day.

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I got this idea from Angie Jones, who has a great web site: www.fitbusinesswoman.com , she was wondering just how much sugar was not being consumed as a result of the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge.

Here are the Numbers:

Most people eat around 1/4 to 1/2 a pound of sugar every day. If you find that number to be high, check out this YouTube video I did to show how easy it is to eat that much sugar. And remember, this is just added sugar and doesn’t include the foods that act like sugar in your body.

So, to calculate how much sugar we are keeping off the streets, we will use the lower end of the calculation: 1/4 pound times 400 people = 100 pounds of sugar every day, or 3,100 pounds for the month of January. Three thousand pounds is the weight of a car, or a small elephant. That is a lot of sugar!

I have a dream of keeping a running tally of how much sugar we have all kept off the streets on my blog, sort of like the old McDonald’s sign that would proclaim how many hamburgers they sold.

The Adventure Continues

I have had so many requests for starting the 30 Sugar Free Days program later in the month or later in the year that I have created a personalized coaching system that you can sign up to anytime. Once signed up, you will receive a series of e-mails that will guide you through the whole 30 Sugar Free Days and will start whenever you want it to start.

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